asciilifeform: ( and , as asciilifeform is fond of observing, stalin's approach on many occasions performed 9000x better than merchant's dubloons approach )
asciilifeform: right -- even if yer king, resources still finite. consider stalin's dilemma of whether to withdraw zhukov's army from far east. ( banked on zorge's report that jp will not break peace treaty, and withdrew 80% . but still had to leave some )
asciilifeform: in his discussion where, approx, 'yes it's good and well that some folx sit and solve ~some~ problems in spare time from salt mine, but not all problems are susceptible to this treatment'
asciilifeform: my impression when reading was that he was thinking of asciilifeform's variant of resistive loss. but possible asciilifeform's bias.
asciilifeform: in ye olde supercomp world, was known as 'process starvation'
asciilifeform can speak only for self, but on various occasions risked piggy bank to try an' convert from serf to d00d who '100% worx from cause', but on each occasion lost shirt. maybe other l1 folx will have better fortune, and sit on mt olympus with mircea_popescu , i dun presently expect to
asciilifeform: this aint any moar avoidable than resistive losses in mains wiring
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i'd hope that mircea_popescu knows how to drive a taiwan, cuz chances are that i'd wrap it around a telephone pole, lol
asciilifeform: the 1 occasion where related, is coupla instances in yrs past when asciilifeform's 'from cause' worx ground to a halt on acct of having to earn bread in saeculum, then asciilifeform rolls eyes at folx who 'motherfucker, where is the promised X/Y/Z'
asciilifeform: ( and it dun keep us from making mutually happy trades on other occasions )
asciilifeform: i dun complain that, e.g., mircea_popescu pays for ice cream but not udplib, it's his dubloons, just as he dun complain that asciilifeform buys ice cream instead of euloratronium, errybody is master of own chest, large or small
asciilifeform: sorta why odin put him upon the green earth
asciilifeform: for the d00d handing out the medals to decide, neh
asciilifeform: i.e. just about all of the problems of 'closed' world , were re-created on substrate of 'open', without anyone so much as deliberately trying
asciilifeform: ( and will add, it is ordinarily trivial to distinguish folx who theorem 'from causes' from the ones who 'for purposes' i.e. 'maybe someone throws penny into hat' )
asciilifeform: i'm not convinced that naggum would've disagreed with this formulation tho
asciilifeform: well yes, anyffing published without expectation of moolah, is 'surplus phenomena', whether theorem or proggy or symphony etc
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: hence naggum's formulation 'open softs are a surplus phenomenon'
asciilifeform: ( or happens as side effect of 'particulars' )
asciilifeform: sometimes abstract work is done by kamikazes who do it from principle, at the expense of sleep and walks in park, the way asciilifeform bakes e.g. ffa. but in general yes , it simply dun happen because nobody pays.
asciilifeform: ~the~ foundational q, imho, of software having a non-zimbabweistic future -- is whether avik can be prevented from killing naggum.
asciilifeform: then saw the very tools of his trade vanishing, as the commercial lisp people slowly starved cuz idjits went 'let's hire 9000 java monkeys, freeeee tooling'
asciilifeform: let's recall the hole that naggum sat in. d00d tried to make living by actually solving tricky problems for folx willing to pay ( oil, gas, jurisprudential db people, etc ) . found that it became harder and eventually impossible on acct of various factors, incl. the lemonization of the market by shitgnomes, asinine eurotaxation regimes, etc
asciilifeform: i mailed it in as a qntra fodder the other day
asciilifeform: in su folx would sometimes secretly repair a crippled 'demilitarized' museum rifle; turning a current-day pc into actual comp is actually ~harder~ procedure than this
asciilifeform: the other detail is that -- unsurprisingly -- the item that became 'accessible' is typically closer to electro-dildo, while actual comp is less gettable than it's been since early '80s
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if had browser that eats sane sexpr instead of the customary shitsoup, good % of what folx want in 'processor' falls away
asciilifeform: so happens that already wrangled the heaviest piece into shape
asciilifeform: i care strictly when stuck cleaning up the splatter with own hand.
asciilifeform: if html centralcommittee had been slightly less retarded, we could've had bitmaps with searchable backing text; or font-height attribute; or any number of 1 thing that'd cure the retardation. but so happens that they were dropped as children, and so we have this.
asciilifeform: alt-tags aint searchable in graphical browser
asciilifeform: if i were writing for dead tree, would've latexed long ago. but i aint
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i saw the plugin thing earlier. it has exactly same problem as latex-by-hand -- bitmapism, resulting in nonsearchable and nonseeable-in-lynx etc text
asciilifeform still grinding through htmlization of ch14, grr
